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Teachable Moments

Living as a Victim or Overcomer

“You don’t know where I’ve been unless you’ve walked in my shoes!” This is absolutely a legitimate sentence, but if that becomes the focus of your life, then you have a problem. I see so many people that live with this victim mentality. We have all walked through terrible situations during our lifetime, some worse than others. We see people on the news every day that have fought evil for up to decades and have managed to overcome and live their lives to the best of their ability. How do we survive these things? That is one of the problems; the word ‘survive’. God has not merely called us to be survivors, but to be overcomers. We are called to rise above our circumstances and learn from our past, but not live in our past.

I know a woman that has multiple daily posts on her social media site that talks about how she has been to hell and back. She posts about unforgiveness and bitterness and how they can destroy you, but lives in a constant state of unforgiveness and bitterness. She has developed a victim mentality. She is always a victim. She is not an overcomer. She may have gone through the fire, but not only did she get burned then, she still lives there. Life has moved on all around her, yet she won’t let leave this camp.

The bible tells us how we walk through the valley of the shadow of death and how we should fear no evil, yet people seem to skip over the word through. Let us not camp out in the valley, but let us continue through it where we climb the mountain to our destiny. Let us not live our lives as victims, but men and women of God who have overcome every bad circumstance in our lives.

I want to be known as an overcomer. I want people to look at me and see what I have become and not where I have been. It is good to remember where we came from, but never ever live there. Move forward. Be who God called you to be.